Exploring Vaccination Hotspots: Insights from Tribal Communities
Since its initial outbreak in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven and exacerbated disparities and inequities across the country. As described in our analysis of vaccine trends across community types, these disparities have carried into county-level vaccination rates. While 58% of the U.S population has been fully vaccinated, recent CDC data has shown that vaccination rates among Indigenous people are the highest among racial and ethnic minority groups.
This trend aligns with the recent vaccine trend analysis, conducted in collaboration with the American Communities Project. Residents of Native American Lands reached 25% vaccination rates back in March — an incredibly fast pace when compared to all other community types identified by the ACP, including Urban Suburbs, Big Cities, College Towns, Graying America, Middle Suburbs, Exurbs, and more. You can dig deeper into the data stratified across each of the 15 community types in our interactive data notebook.
The success in vaccination rollout among Native Americans displayed above may be the result of a sense of urgency against the pain brought on and exacerbated by the pandemic. A look at historical trends of case counts and death rates on the U.S COVID Atlas starts to get at the disproportionate toll of COVID-19 on indigenous groups throughout the country. By selecting the Native American Reservations overlay on the Atlas and scrolling through the date slider, you see the intense and repeated COVID breakouts and hotspots among indigenous communities. The influence of structural neglect on access to medical care, food, water, and sustainable economies within reservations compounded the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S Native Population; indigenous groups experienced more than 3.5 times the infection rate, more than four times the hospitalization rate, and a higher mortality rate than non-Hispanic white Americans.
Native communities responded by enforcing strict lockdowns, maintaining social distancing measures, and — as soon as it was made available — getting vaccinated. The transition from COVID case rate hotspots to vaccination rate hotspots on Native American Reservations displayed below is perhaps in part the result of collective effort and community responsibility following immense and disproportionate turmoil faced throughout the pandemic.
To find and examine hotspots, use the left sidebar to select the data source and variable that you would like to map. Click the hotspot button and use the color ramp at the bottom of the screen to see if a region falls into a hotspot category — reds represent high numbers/percentages, blues represent low counts and percentages, and grey represents areas that do not fall into a hotspot. I used the “Native American Reservations” overlay, further down within the same left sidebar, and explored hotspots for variables such as confirmed case count per 100K, percent fully vaccinated, and percent received at least one dose. The Atlas also features an animated slider and time graph to show the history of Covid-19’s spread — by clicking and dragging my cursor along the slider, I watched hotspots for each selected variable change over time and focused on the Native American Reservations highlighted using the overlay feature.
If you are interested in exploring the trends mentioned in this article or others related to the spread of COVID-19, click here to interact with the U.S COVID Atlas. Scroll through the Atlas’ FAQ page to learn more about different techniques and available tools, and follow us on Twitter at @covid_atlas for the latest news and updates.
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Sinduri Soundararajan is a Research Assistant specializing in design and communications with the US COVID Atlas at the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab. She is a fourth-year in the College and a first-year Master’s in Public Policy candidate at the University of Chicago.
